Category: Links

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 170

On Fri­days I share articles/resources about broad cul­tur­al, soci­etal and the­o­log­i­cal issues. Be sure to see the expla­na­tion and dis­claimers at the bot­tom. I wel­come your sug­ges­tions. If you read some­thing fas­ci­nat­ing please pass it my way.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. So I was most­ly ignor­ing the Kavanaugh nom­i­na­tion, but this week things turned way up. Wow. Here are the arti­cles that have helped to shape my think­ing.
    • What Would a Seri­ous Inves­ti­ga­tion of Brett Kavanaugh Look Like? (Jean­nie Suk Ger­son, New York­er): “…Kavanaugh does not stand to lose some­thing that he already has. He is peti­tion­ing the pub­lic for the priv­i­lege of hold­ing one of the high­est pub­lic offices in the coun­try, and he should have to per­suade us that he didn’t do what he is accused of doing. ”
    • The Kavanaugh Deba­cle (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “I am glad that Ford will have a chance to speak her mind, and that Kavanaugh will have the oppor­tu­ni­ty to defend him­self. But I think this will only make things worse for all of us. If Kavanaugh gets a Sen­ate vote, and pre­vails, he will for­ev­er be taint­ed as a Supreme Court jus­tice. If he is forced to with­draw (that is, with­out fur­ther evi­dence against him emerg­ing), or is vot­ed down, he will become a mar­tyr to many, and will, as the Wall Street Jour­nal edi­to­r­i­al page said, legit­imize ‘weaponiz­ing every sex­u­al assault alle­ga­tion no mat­ter the evi­dence.’”
    • I Believe Her (Caitlin Flana­gan, The Atlantic): “I have been entire­ly agnos­tic about Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nom­i­na­tion. Repub­li­can pres­i­dents nom­i­nate con­ser­v­a­tive judges, and Demo­c­ra­t­ic pres­i­dents nom­i­nate lib­er­al judges. This guy sound­ed like he was entire­ly qual­i­fied for the job. When Dianne Fein­stein made her announce­ment about the super-secret mys­tery let­ter by the anony­mous woman that she had sent to the FBI, I thought it was a Hail Mary pass aimed at scotch­ing the nom­i­na­tion, the kind of dis­taste­ful tac­tic that makes peo­ple hate pol­i­tics.”
    • In Eval­u­at­ing Cred­i­bil­i­ty, the Signs Point in Brett Kavanaugh’s Favor (Dan McLaugh­lin, Nation­al Review): “It’s always a good idea, in pol­i­tics, to eval­u­ate accu­sa­tions against your friends as if they were made against your ene­mies, and to eval­u­ate accu­sa­tions against your ene­mies as if they were made against your friends.” This is a very thor­ough argu­ment.
  2. The Unlike­ly Endurance of Chris­t­ian Rock (Kele­fah San­neh, The New York­er): “On Billboard’s list of the twen­ty most pop­u­lar rock songs of 2017, ful­ly half of them were by bands whose mem­bers have espoused the Chris­t­ian faith.” A strik­ing claim, but you have to count Mor­mons as Chris­tians for the math to work. A fas­ci­nat­ing and well-researched arti­cle nonethe­less.
  3. The Tiny Blond Bible Teacher Tak­ing on the Evan­gel­i­cal Polit­i­cal Machine (Emma Green, The Atlantic): “Where­as her crit­i­cisms of church lead­ers were once veiled, she now speaks her mind freely. She blogged ici­ly about meet­ing a promi­nent male the­olo­gian who looked her up and down and told her she was pret­ti­er than anoth­er famous female Bible teacher. She has cas­ti­gat­ed the evan­gel­i­cal move­ment for sell­ing its soul to buy polit­i­cal wins. “
  4. The Oth­er Polit­i­cal Cor­rect­ness (Isaac Stone Fish, The New Repub­lic): “There is an epi­dem­ic of self-cen­sor­ship at U.S. uni­ver­si­ties on the sub­ject of Chi­na, one that lim­its debate and fun­nels stu­dents and aca­d­e­mics away from top­ics like­ly to offend the Chi­nese Com­mu­nist Par­ty.”
    • From some­one not wor­ried about offend­ing Chi­na: The People’s Repub­lic of Cru­el­ty (Bret Stephens, New York Times): “In the list of what ails Chi­na — slow­ing growth; cor­rupt offi­cial­dom; a declin­ing birth rate; a trade war with the U.S.; Xi Jinping’s cult of per­son­al­i­ty; the inher­ent dis­con­nect between a pol­i­tics of repres­sion and the spir­it of inno­va­tion — the regime’s war on the soul doesn’t usu­al­ly rank high. But it mat­ters most. It means the regime has made an ene­my of the one thing it can­not kill, cap­ture, erad­i­cate or cure. At some point it will either have to aban­don the strug­gle or destroy itself in the effort, much as the Sovi­et Union did.”
  5. So a Chica­go priest who was once abused burns a rain­bow-cross flag: All heck breaks out (Ter­ry Mat­ting­ly, GetRe­li­gion): the title is click­baity, but the arti­cle deliv­ers. “Well, here is a hot-but­ton sto­ry if I’ve ever seen one.”
  6. The Lib­er­al­ism of the Reli­gious Right (Emi­ly Ekins, New York Times): “Reli­gion appears to actu­al­ly be mod­er­at­ing con­ser­v­a­tive atti­tudes, par­tic­u­lar­ly on some of the most polar­iz­ing issues of our time: race, immi­gra­tion and iden­ti­ty. Church­go­ing Trump vot­ers have more favor­able feel­ings toward African-Amer­i­cans, His­pan­ics, Asians, Jews, Mus­lims and immi­grants com­pared with non­re­li­gious Trump vot­ers. This holds up even while account­ing for demo­graph­ic fac­tors like edu­ca­tion and race.“ Rec­om­mend­ed by an alum­nus.
  7. What Do We Owe Her Now? (Eliz­a­beth Bru­enig, Wash­ing­ton Post): “‘The exam­i­na­tion that I did was con­sis­tent with what [Wyatt] said,’ [Nurse] Schi­a­vo told me when I con­tact­ed her this May to dis­cuss her find­ing. ‘That girl was raped.’ As I read her exam notes aloud to her over the phone, Schi­a­vo began to fill in details on her own. She remem­bered Wyatt’s case all these years lat­er, right down to the fact that she was nev­er called to court to tes­ti­fy about it.” This is a depress­ing sto­ry, well-researched.
    • The fol­low-up is more encour­ag­ing: Amber Wyatt told her sto­ry of rape. This is how the world respond­ed. (Eliz­a­beth Bru­enig, Wash­ing­ton Post): “The day after her 29th birth­day, which was also the day after her sto­ry first appeared online, Amber Wyatt, now Wil­son, stood in the show­er in her San Mar­cos home and sobbed — hard, wrench­ing, wrung-out tears. They had been a long time in com­ing.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have On Polit­i­cal Cor­rect­ness (William Dere­siewicz, The Amer­i­can Schol­ar): a long and thought­ful arti­cle. “Selec­tive pri­vate col­leges have become reli­gious schools. The reli­gion in ques­tion is not Method­ism or Catholi­cism but an extreme ver­sion of the belief sys­tem of the lib­er­al elite: the lib­er­al pro­fes­sion­al, man­age­r­i­al, and cre­ative class­es, which pro­vide a large major­i­ty of stu­dents enrolled at such places and an even larg­er major­i­ty of fac­ul­ty and admin­is­tra­tors who work at them. To attend those insti­tu­tions is to be social­ized, and not infre­quent­ly, indoc­tri­nat­ed into that reli­gion…. I say this, by the way, as an athe­ist, a demo­c­ra­t­ic social­ist, a native north­east­ern­er, a per­son who believes that col­leges should not have sports teams in the first place—and in case it isn’t obvi­ous by now, a card-car­ry­ing mem­ber of the lib­er­al elite.” (first shared in vol­ume 92)

Why Do You Send This Email?

In the time of King David, the tribe of Issachar pro­duced shrewd war­riors “who under­stood the times and knew what Israel should do” (1 Chron 12:32). In a sim­i­lar way, we need to become wise peo­ple whose faith inter­acts with the world. I pray this email gives you greater insight, so that you may con­tin­ue the tra­di­tion of Issachar.

Disclaimer

Chi Alpha is not a par­ti­san orga­ni­za­tion. To para­phrase anoth­er min­is­ter: we are not about the donkey’s agen­da and we are not about the elephant’s agen­da — we are about the Lamb’s agen­da. Hav­ing said that, I read wide­ly (in part because I believe we should aspire to pass the ide­o­log­i­cal Tur­ing test and in part because I do not believe I can fair­ly say “I agree” or “I dis­agree” until I can say “I under­stand”) and may at times share arti­cles that have a strong par­ti­san bias sim­ply because I find the arti­cle stim­u­lat­ing. The upshot: you should not assume I agree with every­thing an author says in an arti­cle I men­tion, much less things the author has said in oth­er arti­cles (although if I strong­ly dis­agree with some­thing in the arti­cle I’ll usu­al­ly men­tion it). And to the extent you can dis­cern my opin­ions, please under­stand that they are my own and not nec­es­sar­i­ly those of Chi Alpha or any oth­er orga­ni­za­tion I may be per­ceived to rep­re­sent.

Also, remem­ber that I’m not report­ing news — I’m giv­ing you a selec­tion of things I found inter­est­ing. There’s a lot hap­pen­ing in the world that’s not mak­ing an appear­ance here because I haven’t found stim­u­lat­ing arti­cles writ­ten about it.

If this was for­ward­ed to you and you want to receive future emails, sign up here. You can also view the archives.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 169

On Fri­days I share articles/resources about broad cul­tur­al, soci­etal and the­o­log­i­cal issues. Be sure to see the expla­na­tion and dis­claimers at the bot­tom. I wel­come your sug­ges­tions. If you read some­thing fas­ci­nat­ing please pass it my way.

Things Glen Found Interesting

This one is com­ing to you from Seoul. I’ve been super busy on this mis­sion trip, so these are select­ed from a less wide range than nor­mal.

  1. The Ide­o­log­i­cal Blind­ness at the Heart of Media Bias (David French, Nation­al Review): “It is con­sis­tent­ly inter­est­ing to me that main­stream media out­lets have some­how con­vinced them­selves of two con­tra­dic­to­ry things at once: 1) They can­not fair­ly cov­er Amer­i­ca with­out a news­room that more or less looks like Amer­i­ca, but 2) they can cov­er Amer­i­can with­out a news­room that thinks like Amer­i­ca.”
  2. God Doesn’t Turn A Blind Eye To Abuse, Nei­ther Should The Church (Rus­sell Moore, Gospel Coali­tion): “Many through­out the cen­turies have sought to pro­tect the rep­u­ta­tion of God by down­play­ing his wrath. To some degree, the impulse here is good, because many have a false view of God as an angry, sullen, puni­tive deity, not as the God of over­flow­ing love Jesus revealed to us. God’s wrath isn’t a tem­per tantrum. On the oth­er hand, those who point us away from the wrath of God do so at the per­il of eclips­ing God’s own rev­e­la­tion of him­self as holy and just, the One who ‘does not leave the guilty unpun­ished’ (Ex. 34:7). At the cross, the apos­tle Paul wrote, God ‘con­demned sin in the flesh’ (Rom. 8:3). This is impor­tant for us to know, espe­cial­ly those who have sur­vived awful things…. At the cross, God’s wrath and God’s love come togeth­er. They don’t can­cel one anoth­er out.”
  3. Remem­ber those arti­cles I shared about the hor­rif­ic Chi­na crack­down on Mus­lims? Now they are turn­ing their atten­tion to Chris­tians (although much less intense­ly — the sit­u­a­tion with the Mus­lims has echoes of con­cen­tra­tion camps).
    • Chi­na Bans Zion, Beijing’s Biggest House Church (Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Bei­jing author­i­ties threat­ened to close Zion Church last month after the 1,500-member con­gre­ga­tion, one of the Chi­nese capital’s largest house church­es, refused to install sur­veil­lance cam­eras in its sanc­tu­ary. After ser­vices on Sun­day, offi­cials deliv­ered on their threat to the unof­fi­cial Protes­tant con­gre­ga­tion, which meets in a ren­o­vat­ed hall in north­ern Bei­jing. Zion is now banned and its mate­ri­als con­fis­cat­ed.…”
    • Group: Offi­cials destroy­ing cross­es, burn­ing bibles in Chi­na (AP News): “China’s gov­ern­ment is ratch­et­ing up a crack­down on Chris­t­ian con­gre­ga­tions in Bei­jing and sev­er­al provinces, destroy­ing cross­es, burn­ing bibles, shut­ting church­es and order­ing fol­low­ers to sign papers renounc­ing their faith, accord­ing to pas­tors and a group that mon­i­tors reli­gion in Chi­na.”
    • Church raid­ed amid esca­lat­ing crack­down (Chi­naAid): “All across Chi­na, church­es are fac­ing pres­sures unprece­dent­ed since the reign of dic­ta­tor Mao Zedong. In Henan, where a con­cen­trat­ed crack­down is occur­ring, sev­en min­is­ters were arrest­ed and then lat­er released that evening…. Addi­tion­al­ly, local offi­cials in Wen­zhou, Zhe­jiang dis­trib­uted a form col­lect­ing infor­ma­tion on the reli­gious beliefs of mid­dle school stu­dents and their par­ents. This could have dan­ger­ous reper­cus­sions, as Chi­nese reg­u­la­tions for­bid par­ents from teach­ing reli­gion to their chil­dren.”
    • Chi­na Mulls Major Restric­tions on Online Min­istries (Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Chi­nese Chris­tians have one month to tell their gov­ern­ment what they think of pro­posed new rules that ban the shar­ing of prayer, Bible read­ing, bap­tism, com­mu­nion, and oth­er forms of reli­gious activ­i­ty online.“
  4. Vice And Fire (Peter Hitchens, First Things): “As far as I can find out, ­Mar­tin is a lapsed Roman Catholic and has quite banal views about how reli­gion caus­es wars and God is a ‘giant invis­i­ble guy in the sky.’ I do not think he has set out to make an attack on Chris­tian­i­ty. I do not think he espe­cial­ly likes it, but I sus­pect he has dis­card­ed it, and so he has writ­ten an account of a world in which it sim­ply does not exist. His fan­ta­sy great­ly dis­turbs me, because it helps to nor­mal­ize the indif­fer­ence to Chris­tian­i­ty which is a far greater threat to it than active athe­ism.” This is an excel­lent cri­tique of the huge­ly over­rat­ed Game Of Thrones.
  5. After Both­am Jean’s shoot­ing death, his Dal­las church intent on seek­ing jus­tice (Bob­by Ross, Jr., The Chris­t­ian Chron­i­cle): “By all accounts, Both­am Jean was a devot­ed man of faith with a ‘beau­ti­ful’ and ‘pow­er­ful’ singing voice. He was bap­tized at age 10 in his native St. Lucia and moved to the U.S. at age 19 to attend Hard­ing Uni­ver­si­ty in Searcy, Ark., where he often led wor­ship in chapel and served as a min­istry intern with the Col­lege Church of Christ.”
    • Relat­ed: The Worst Police Shoot­ing Yet (David French, Nation­al Review): “We ask police offi­cers to be brave. We ask offi­cers to face a much high­er degree of dan­ger than civil­ians. We ask them to show restraint even in the face of provo­ca­tions and tense con­fronta­tions. There are count­less among them who do all we ask, and more. But we also ask some­thing else: that police offi­cers be sub­ject to the very laws they’re sworn to enforce.”
    • Relat­ed: End Qual­i­fied Immu­ni­ty (David French, Nation­al Review): “A police offi­cer killed a com­plete­ly inno­cent man because of the officer’s inex­cus­able mis­take. He escaped crim­i­nal pros­e­cu­tion. And then he even escaped civ­il lia­bil­i­ty — because of a lit­tle-known, judge-made legal doc­trine called qual­i­fied immu­ni­ty.” Note that French is writ­ing about a dif­fer­ent case in this arti­cle.
    • Relat­ed: Should Cops Be Immune From Law­suits? (Matt Ford, The New Repub­lic): “The prob­lems with qual­i­fied immu­ni­ty mir­ror a deep­er and more dis­turb­ing trend in the law. Courts, which are sup­posed to be the great vin­di­ca­tors of Amer­i­cans’ rights and lib­er­ties, are increas­ing­ly closed off to them.”
  6. Cal­i­for­nia leg­is­la­tor shelves bill to ban paid ‘gay con­ver­sion ther­a­py’ for adults (Melanie Mason, LA TImes): “The news of Low’s deci­sion was laud­ed by oppo­nents to the mea­sure. Jonathan Keller, pres­i­dent of the social­ly con­ser­v­a­tive orga­ni­za­tion Cal­i­for­nia Fam­i­ly Coun­cil, said his group was ‘inex­press­ibly grate­ful’ to Low for lis­ten­ing to reli­gious com­mu­ni­ties.”
  7. Does Our Cul­tur­al Obses­sion With Safe­ty Spell the Down­fall of Democ­ra­cy? (Thomas Chat­ter­ton Williams, New York Times): These are “‘the three Great Untruths’ of the cur­rent moment: ‘what doesn’t kill you makes you weak­er’; ‘always trust your feel­ings’; ‘life is a bat­tle between good peo­ple and evil peo­ple.’” This is a review of two books and is quite insight­ful.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have some thoughts about slav­ery and the Bible – Does The Bible Sup­port Slav­ery? (a lec­ture giv­en by the war­den of Tyn­dale House at Cam­bridge Uni­ver­si­ty, the link is to the video with notes) and Does God Con­done Slav­ery In The Bible? (Part One – Old Tes­ta­ment) and also Part Two – New Tes­ta­ment (longer pieces from Glenn Miller at Chris­t­ian Think­tank). All three are quite help­ful. (first shared in vol­ume 76)

Why Do You Send This Email?

In the time of King David, the tribe of Issachar pro­duced shrewd war­riors “who under­stood the times and knew what Israel should do” (1 Chron 12:32). In a sim­i­lar way, we need to become wise peo­ple whose faith inter­acts with the world. I pray this email gives you greater insight, so that you may con­tin­ue the tra­di­tion of Issachar.

Disclaimer

Chi Alpha is not a par­ti­san orga­ni­za­tion. To para­phrase anoth­er min­is­ter: we are not about the donkey’s agen­da and we are not about the elephant’s agen­da — we are about the Lamb’s agen­da. Hav­ing said that, I read wide­ly (in part because I believe we should aspire to pass the ide­o­log­i­cal Tur­ing test and in part because I do not believe I can fair­ly say “I agree” or “I dis­agree” until I can say “I under­stand”) and may at times share arti­cles that have a strong par­ti­san bias sim­ply because I find the arti­cle stim­u­lat­ing. The upshot: you should not assume I agree with every­thing an author says in an arti­cle I men­tion, much less things the author has said in oth­er arti­cles (although if I strong­ly dis­agree with some­thing in the arti­cle I’ll usu­al­ly men­tion it). And to the extent you can dis­cern my opin­ions, please under­stand that they are my own and not nec­es­sar­i­ly those of Chi Alpha or any oth­er orga­ni­za­tion I may be per­ceived to rep­re­sent.

Also, remem­ber that I’m not report­ing news — I’m giv­ing you a selec­tion of things I found inter­est­ing. There’s a lot hap­pen­ing in the world that’s not mak­ing an appear­ance here because I haven’t found stim­u­lat­ing arti­cles writ­ten about it.

If this was for­ward­ed to you and you want to receive future emails, sign up here. You can also view the archives.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 168

On Fri­days I share articles/resources about broad cul­tur­al, soci­etal and the­o­log­i­cal issues. Be sure to see the expla­na­tion and dis­claimers at the bot­tom. I wel­come your sug­ges­tions. If you read some­thing fas­ci­nat­ing please pass it my way.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Most Momen­tous Place? (Alex Tabar­rok, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “The old city of Jerusalem is aston­ish­ing­ly small for a city with so many momen­tous places. One can walk from Christianity’s holi­est site to the holi­est site of Judaism, paus­ing to look at one of the holi­est sites of Islam, in less time than it takes to walk from my office on the cam­pus of George Mason Uni­ver­si­ty to the cam­pus Star­bucks.” Short and provoca­tive.
  2. Aus­trali­a’s new Pen­te­costal prime min­is­ter: Try to guess how the press is receiv­ing him (Ira Rifkin, GetRe­li­gion): “…the new prime min­is­ter, Scott Mor­ri­son, is an out­spo­ken, polit­i­cal­ly con­ser­v­a­tive Pen­te­costal Chris­t­ian. This mix­ing of reli­gion and pol­i­tics may be old-hat at this point for Amer­i­cans. But it’s an entire­ly new expe­ri­ence for Aus­tralians.”
  3. My nephew tried to school me on cul­tur­al appro­pri­a­tion. It did­n’t end well.(Jack Van­No­ord, Chica­go Tri­bune): fic­tion­al, amus­ing, and makes a seri­ous point about glob­al cul­tur­al exchange. “Most weeks, his less-woke friends go out for Taco Tues­days, but not Kyle. No more hum­mus. No more bagels. No mo’ pho. Poor Kyle. Liv­ing the unap­pro­pri­at­ed life is tough busi­ness. When­ev­er it rains, Kyle gets soaked. No more umbrel­las for him. Chi­nese. Kyle has stopped binge watch­ing ‘The Walk­ing Dead’ once I men­tioned the word for, and the con­cept of, zom­bies were appro­pri­at­ed from West Africa. Kyle was tak­ing a sum­mer math course at the com­mu­ni­ty col­lege. But he dropped out. It was just too hard. His home­work was tak­ing all evening. He was doing all his assign­ments using Roman numer­als since Ara­bic numer­als are … well, Ara­bic.”
  4. The Reli­gious Typol­o­gy (Pew Research Cen­ter): “ a new Pew Research Cen­ter analy­sis looks at beliefs and behav­iors that cut across many denom­i­na­tions – impor­tant traits that unite peo­ple of dif­fer­ent faiths, or that divide peo­ple who have the same reli­gious affil­i­a­tion – pro­duc­ing a new and reveal­ing clas­si­fi­ca­tion, or typol­o­gy, of reli­gion in Amer­i­ca.”
  5. A Prison That’s Also a Loony Bin (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “A trans­gen­der pris­on­er has admit­ted sex­u­al­ly assault­ing inmates at a women’s jail. Karen White, 51, who was born male but now iden­ti­fies as a woman, has plead­ed guilty to two counts of sex­u­al touch­ing at New Hall Prison, Wake­field.” The sto­ry is astound­ing.
  6. Bet­ter Dead Than Dis­abled? (Charles Camosy, Com­mon­weal): “pro­lif­ers are not imag­in­ing things: argu­ments in favor of the autonomous moral and legal choice to com­mit infan­ti­cide are easy to find…. [for exam­ple, a] 2012 arti­cle by moral philoso­phers Alber­to Giu­bili­ni and Francesca Min­er­va, which appeared in the respect­ed Jour­nal of Med­ical Ethics, was provoca­tive­ly titled ‘After-Birth Abor­tion: Why Should the Baby Live?’”
  7. Diary of a Con­cus­sion: What I Learned About Head Injuries By Hav­ing One (Eliz­a­beth Lopat­to, The Verge): “To have your per­son­al­i­ty altered by brain trau­ma seems to upset peo­ple more than hav­ing it altered by, for instance, emo­tion­al trau­ma. I don’t know why this is! …. If I thought I was my brain, prob­a­bly I would have found the injury more upset­ting. But I didn’t and don’t believe that; my self is an inter­ac­tion between my body and my brain.” This is a year old but I just stum­bled upon it. Super inter­est­ing.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have How To Pray A Psalm (Justin Tay­lor, Gospel Coali­tion): prayer life need a boost? Give this a try. (first shared in vol­ume 69)

Why Do You Send This Email?

In the time of King David, the tribe of Issachar pro­duced shrewd war­riors “who under­stood the times and knew what Israel should do” (1 Chron 12:32). In a sim­i­lar way, we need to become wise peo­ple whose faith inter­acts with the world. I pray this email gives you greater insight, so that you may con­tin­ue the tra­di­tion of Issachar.

Disclaimer

Chi Alpha is not a par­ti­san orga­ni­za­tion. To para­phrase anoth­er min­is­ter: we are not about the donkey’s agen­da and we are not about the elephant’s agen­da — we are about the Lamb’s agen­da. Hav­ing said that, I read wide­ly (in part because I believe we should aspire to pass the ide­o­log­i­cal Tur­ing test and in part because I do not believe I can fair­ly say “I agree” or “I dis­agree” until I can say “I under­stand”) and may at times share arti­cles that have a strong par­ti­san bias sim­ply because I find the arti­cle stim­u­lat­ing. The upshot: you should not assume I agree with every­thing an author says in an arti­cle I men­tion, much less things the author has said in oth­er arti­cles (although if I strong­ly dis­agree with some­thing in the arti­cle I’ll usu­al­ly men­tion it). And to the extent you can dis­cern my opin­ions, please under­stand that they are my own and not nec­es­sar­i­ly those of Chi Alpha or any oth­er orga­ni­za­tion I may be per­ceived to rep­re­sent.

Also, remem­ber that I’m not report­ing news — I’m giv­ing you a selec­tion of things I found inter­est­ing. There’s a lot hap­pen­ing in the world that’s not mak­ing an appear­ance here because I haven’t found stim­u­lat­ing arti­cles writ­ten about it.

If this was for­ward­ed to you and you want to receive future emails, sign up here. You can also view the archives.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 167

On Fri­days I share articles/resources about broad cul­tur­al, soci­etal and the­o­log­i­cal issues. Be sure to see the expla­na­tion and dis­claimers at the bot­tom. I wel­come your sug­ges­tions. If you read some­thing fas­ci­nat­ing please pass it my way.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. The Catholic Church is fac­ing a tremen­dous cri­sis, one poten­tial­ly far big­ger than any I have seen in my life­time. There’s been a lot of ink spilled about it. Here are some pieces I found illu­mi­nat­ing.
    • Protes­tants Should Care Deeply about the Catholic Cat­a­stro­phe (David French, Nation­al Review): “The Church is like a navy, a col­lec­tion of ships unit­ed in pur­pose and in des­ti­na­tion. Each denom­i­na­tion is like a dif­fer­ent ship in that navy, and while each crew is pri­mar­i­ly tasked with the health and well-being of its own ves­sel, it’s also deeply invest­ed in the strength of the fleet. Each ves­sel is more vul­ner­a­ble as the fleet weak­ens. Each ves­sel is stronger sur­round­ed by its pro­tec­tive arma­da. If the anal­o­gy holds, then one of the might­i­est bat­tle­ships in the fleet, the Catholic Church, is tak­ing tor­pe­does left and right.”
    • A Catholic Civ­il War? (Matthew Schmitz, New York Times): “…the Catholic Church has been plunged into all-out civ­il war. On one side are the tra­di­tion­al­ists, who insist that abuse can be pre­vent­ed only by tighter adher­ence to church doc­trine. On the oth­er side are the lib­er­als, who demand that the church cease con­demn­ing homo­sex­u­al acts and allow gay priests to step out of the clos­et.” This may sound like hyper­bole, but I believe it is accu­rate.
    • Catholics Face A Painful Ques­tion: Is It True? (Eliz­a­beth Bru­enig, Wash­ing­ton Post): “In his state­ments on Viganò’s tes­ti­mo­ny last Sun­day, Fran­cis invit­ed jour­nal­ists to use their skills and capac­i­ties to draw con­clu­sions about the mat­ter. And so, on Mon­day morn­ing, I began to try.” This is sad. It seems the only per­son doing actu­al jour­nal­ism on this for a major news­pa­per is… an opin­ion colum­nist. It stinks to high heav­en that the major papers aren’t fero­cious­ly pur­su­ing this.
    • What Did Pope Fran­cis Know? (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “this doesn’t mean that the pope should resign — not even if Viganò is ful­ly vin­di­cat­ed. One papal res­ig­na­tion per mil­len­ni­um is more than enough. That cop-out should not be eas­i­ly avail­able to pon­tif­fs con­front­ed with scan­dals, includ­ing scan­dals of their own mak­ing, any more than it should be avail­able to fathers.”
    • Answer­ing Vigano’s Crit­ics (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “Again: if the alle­ga­tions are false, you say, ‘They’re false.’ But that’s not what the Pope said. At all. If the Pope thinks he can ignore Vigano as he has ignored the dubia car­di­nals, he is grave­ly mis­tak­en.”
    • Sto­ry of bomb­shell charges against Pope more sur­re­al by the minute (John L. Allen, Jr., Crux): “If there’s one thing any­one who’s cov­ered the Vat­i­can for a long time ought to have learned by now, it’s nev­er to say a par­tic­u­lar sto­ry just can’t get any­more sur­re­al, because trust me — it always can.”
  2. The School Shoot­ings That Weren’t (Anya Kamenetz, Alex­is Arnold, and Emi­ly Car­di­nali, NPR): Dif­fi­cult to excerpt the key data, so here’s the sum­ma­ry: schools report­ed 240 shoot­ings in the 2015–2016 school year, but NPR fol­lowed up and was only able to ver­i­fy 11. How did this hap­pen? “the law of real­ly, real­ly big num­bers. Temkin notes that ‘240 schools is less than half of 1 per­cent,’ of the schools in the sur­vey. ‘It’s in the mar­gin of error.’ ”
  3. There was a reveal­ing ker­fluffle at Brown Uni­ver­si­ty.
    • Rapid-onset gen­der dys­pho­ria in ado­les­cents and young adults: A study of parental reports (Lisa Littman, PLOS ONE): “The ele­vat­ed num­ber of friends per friend­ship group who became trans­gen­der-iden­ti­fied, the pat­tern of clus­ter out­breaks of trans­gen­der-iden­ti­fi­ca­tion in these friend­ship groups, the sub­stan­tial per­cent­age of friend­ship groups where the major­i­ty of the mem­bers became trans­gen­der-iden­ti­fied, and the peer group dynam­ics observed all serve to sup­port the plau­si­bil­i­ty of social and peer con­ta­gion for ROGD [Rapid Onset Gen­der Dys­pho­ria]. The wors­en­ing of men­tal well-being and par­ent-child rela­tion­ships and behav­iors that iso­late teens from their par­ents, fam­i­lies, non-trans­gen­der friends and main­stream sources of infor­ma­tion are par­tic­u­lar­ly con­cern­ing. More research is need­ed to bet­ter under­stand rapid-onset gen­der dys­pho­ria, its impli­ca­tions, and scope.” The research paper in ques­tion.
    • Jour­nal Look­ing Into Study on ‘Rapid-Onset Gen­der Dys­pho­ria’ (Colleen Fla­her­ty, Inside High­er Ed): “Brown Uni­ver­si­ty and PLOS ONE have dis­tanced them­selves from a con­tro­ver­sial, peer-reviewed pub­lished study on ‘rapid-onset gen­der dys­pho­ria,’ or gen­der iden­ti­ty issues that present not ear­ly and over a life­time but quick­ly, in teenagers and young adults.” This is the neu­tral take.
    • New paper ignites storm over whether teens expe­ri­ence ‘rapid onset’ of trans­gen­der iden­ti­ty (Mered­ith Wad­man, Sci­ence): “The actions by the jour­nal and the uni­ver­si­ty have infu­ri­at­ed some researchers who say the moves tram­ple aca­d­e­m­ic free­dom, although the paper remains freely avail­able. ‘This is a sad day for @BrownUniversity, and an indict­ment of the integri­ty of their aca­d­e­m­ic and admin­is­tra­tive lead­er­ship,’ Jef­frey Fli­er, a for­mer dean of Har­vard Med­ical School in Boston and a pro­fes­sor of med­i­cine there, tweet­ed on Mon­day.” This is a slight­ly more feisty take.
    • Ryan T. Ander­son on Twit­ter: “If this is the sort of cen­sor­ship that takes place out in the open, just image what’s tak­ing place behind closed doors. All because this research reached polit­i­cal­ly incor­rect con­clu­sion. But when lives are at stake, it’s more impor­tant to be cor­rect than polit­i­cal­ly cor­rect.” A feisty and I sus­pect very accu­rate take.
  4. The French, Com­ing Apart (Christo­pher Cald­well, City Jour­nal): “Since Toc­queville, we have under­stood that our demo­c­ra­t­ic soci­eties are emu­la­tive. Nobody wants to be thought a big­ot if the mem­ber­ship board of the coun­try club takes pride in its mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism. But as the prospect of ris­ing in the world is ham­pered or extin­guished, the induce­ments to ide­o­log­i­cal con­formism weak­en. Dis­sent appears. Polit­i­cal cor­rect­ness grows more dra­con­ian. Final­ly the rul­ing class reach­es a dan­ger­ous stage, in which it begins to lose not only its legit­i­ma­cy but also a sense of what its legit­i­ma­cy rest­ed on in the first place.” This is a fas­ci­nat­ing arti­cle that’s sort of about France, sort of about Amer­i­ca, and most­ly about West­ern moder­ni­ty.
  5. Chi­na Is Treat­ing Islam Like A Men­tal Ill­ness (Sigal Samuel, The Atlantic): “The med­ical anal­o­gy is one way the gov­ern­ment tries to jus­ti­fy its pol­i­cy of large-scale intern­ment: After all, attempt­ing to inoc­u­late a whole pop­u­la­tion against, say, the flu, requires giv­ing flu shots not just to the already-afflict­ed few, but to a crit­i­cal mass of peo­ple. In fact, using this rhetoric, Chi­na has tried to defend a sys­tem of arrest quo­tas for Uighurs. Police offi­cers con­firmed to Radio Free Asia that they are under orders to meet spe­cif­ic pop­u­la­tion tar­gets when round­ing up peo­ple for intern­ment. In one town­ship, police offi­cials said they were being ordered to send 40 per­cent of the local pop­u­la­tion to the camps.” I’ve men­tioned this before, but it tru­ly is one of the scan­dals of the mod­ern world.
  6. With Flow­ers In Their Hair (Andrew Fer­gu­son, The Week­ly Stan­dard): “The seeds of the destruc­tion of the Haight exper­i­ment could be found in its own antin­o­mi­an­ism, in its orig­i­nal inspi­ra­tion. Maybe the whole­sale rejec­tion of time-hon­ored and time-test­ed val­ues — monogamy, mod­er­a­tion, good man­ners, self-denial, self-con­trol, the sanc­ti­ty of pri­vate prop­er­ty, per­son­al account­abil­i­ty to high­er author­i­ties, both mate­r­i­al and spir­i­tu­al — leads to squalor and mis­ery. Maybe the project they’re cel­e­brat­ing in San Fran­cis­co this sum­mer was doomed from the start.” Long and good.
  7. Amer­i­ca Soured on My Mul­tira­cial Fam­i­ly (David French, The Atlantic): “There are three fun­da­men­tal, com­pli­cat­ing truths about adop­tion. First, every sin­gle adop­tion begins with pro­found loss. Through death, aban­don­ment, or even lov­ing sur­ren­der, a child suf­fers the loss of his or her moth­er and father. Sec­ond, the demo­graph­ics of those in need of lov­ing homes do not pre­cise­ly match the demo­graph­ics of those seek­ing a new child. Adop­tive par­ents are dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly white. Adopt­ed chil­dren are not. Thus, mul­tira­cial fam­i­lies are a nat­ur­al and inevitable con­se­quence of the adop­tion process. Third, Amer­i­can cul­ture has long been obsessed with ques­tions of race and iden­ti­ty.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have The world will only get weird­er (Steven Coast, per­son­al blog): “We fixed all the main rea­sons air­craft crash a long time ago. Some­times a long, long time ago. So, we are left with the less and less prob­a­ble events.” The piece is a few years old so the exam­ples are dat­ed, but it remains very intrigu­ing. (first shared in vol­ume 67)

Why Do You Send This Email?

In the time of King David, the tribe of Issachar pro­duced shrewd war­riors “who under­stood the times and knew what Israel should do” (1 Chron 12:32). In a sim­i­lar way, we need to become wise peo­ple whose faith inter­acts with the world. I pray this email gives you greater insight, so that you may con­tin­ue the tra­di­tion of Issachar.

Disclaimer

Chi Alpha is not a par­ti­san orga­ni­za­tion. To para­phrase anoth­er min­is­ter: we are not about the donkey’s agen­da and we are not about the elephant’s agen­da — we are about the Lamb’s agen­da. Hav­ing said that, I read wide­ly (in part because I believe we should aspire to pass the ide­o­log­i­cal Tur­ing test and in part because I do not believe I can fair­ly say “I agree” or “I dis­agree” until I can say “I under­stand”) and may at times share arti­cles that have a strong par­ti­san bias sim­ply because I find the arti­cle stim­u­lat­ing. The upshot: you should not assume I agree with every­thing an author says in an arti­cle I men­tion, much less things the author has said in oth­er arti­cles (although if I strong­ly dis­agree with some­thing in the arti­cle I’ll usu­al­ly men­tion it). And to the extent you can dis­cern my opin­ions, please under­stand that they are my own and not those of any orga­ni­za­tion I work for or rep­re­sent.

Also, remem­ber that I’m not report­ing news — I’m giv­ing you a selec­tion of things I found inter­est­ing. There’s a lot hap­pen­ing in the world that’s not mak­ing an appear­ance here because I haven’t found stim­u­lat­ing arti­cles writ­ten about it.

If this was for­ward­ed to you and you want to receive future emails, sign up here. You can also view the archives.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 166

On Fri­days I share articles/resources about broad cul­tur­al, soci­etal and the­o­log­i­cal issues. Be sure to see the expla­na­tion and dis­claimers at the bot­tom. I wel­come your sug­ges­tions. If you read some­thing fas­ci­nat­ing please pass it my way.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. God’s May­or in Guatemala (Dale Han­son Bourke, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “In the so-called North­ern Tri­an­gle of Cen­tral Amer­i­ca, the coun­tries of Hon­duras, El Sal­vador, and Guatemala form a vio­lent tri­ad. The mur­der rate is high­er in this region than in most active war zones. Gangs, car­tels, and vig­i­lantes impose their will, tak­ing over or co-opt­ing legit­i­mate police forces and rou­tine­ly ter­ror­iz­ing aver­age cit­i­zens…. In the mid­dle of this vio­lence sits the town of San Cristóbal Acasaguastlán, a pic­turesque oasis of calm with a pop­u­la­tion of about 6,000 peo­ple. What sets this place apart are the efforts of Jeaneth Ordoñez, the Chris­t­ian may­or who has unit­ed the towns­peo­ple in their quest to keep the munic­i­pal­i­ty free of the vio­lence and upheaval that sur­rounds them.”
  2. No alco­hol safe to drink, glob­al study con­firms (Lau­rel Ives, BBC): “A large new glob­al study pub­lished in the Lancet has con­firmed pre­vi­ous research which has shown that there is no safe lev­el of alco­hol con­sump­tion. The researchers admit mod­er­ate drink­ing may pro­tect against heart dis­ease but found that the risk of can­cer and oth­er dis­eases out­weighs these pro­tec­tions.” The under­ly­ing research: Alco­hol use and bur­den for 195 coun­tries and ter­ri­to­ries, 1990–2016: a sys­tem­at­ic analy­sis for the Glob­al Bur­den of Dis­ease Study 2016 (The Lancet. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(18)31310–2)
  3. Chris­tians to Sci­ence: Leave Ani­mals the Way God Designed Them—Except Mos­qui­toes (Rebec­ca Ran­dall, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Mess­ing with nature or God’s plan was a top con­cern for those opposed to engi­neer­ing ani­mal meat to be more nutri­tious (22%), bring­ing back an extinct species (23%), or mak­ing aquar­i­um fish glow (18%). The rea­son cit­ed most often to oppose cre­at­ing glow­ing fish was sim­ply that it is unnec­es­sary and friv­o­lous (48%).” Appar­ent­ly I am an out­lier. Make the fish glow, make meat more nutri­tious, and deal with mos­qui­to-borne dis­ease. I real­ly like the way the Kenyan researcher quot­ed in the arti­cle encour­ages us to tar­get the par­a­site and not the car­ri­er. We are made in the image of God so that we can exer­cise domin­ion over Cre­ation!
  4. The Peter Prin­ci­ple is a joke tak­en seri­ous­ly. Is it true? (Tim Har­ford, Finan­cial Times): “The authors of the paper dis­cov­ered that the best sales­peo­ple were more like­ly to be pro­mot­ed, and that they were then ter­ri­ble man­agers. The bet­ter they had been in sales, the worse their teams per­formed once they arrived in a man­age­r­i­al role. What’s more, peo­ple were not pro­mot­ed for behav­iour that might seem cor­re­lat­ed with man­age­r­i­al abil­i­ty — in par­tic­u­lar, those who col­lab­o­rat­ed with oth­ers were not reward­ed for doing so. What mat­tered were sales, pure and sim­ple.” It may be the case that you should dress for the job you want, but if you want to get pro­mot­ed you had bet­ter rock the job you have.
  5. Gay Men Are Dif­fer­ent, Says Gay Male Read­er (Rod Dreher, The Amer­i­can Con­ser­v­a­tive): “Well-mean­ing straight lib­er­als just do not get it, and lots of gay men will not crit­i­cize any­thing gay men col­lec­tive­ly do because they think it will result in both lots of anger from oth­er gay men as well as the empow­er­ment of ide­o­log­i­cal ene­mies who want to, say, ban gay mar­riage. Men and women are fun­da­men­tal­ly dif­fer­ent and a male-female sex­u­al cul­ture is not going to be the same as a male-male sex­u­al cul­ture.” I sus­pect this will con­sid­ered con­tro­ver­sial by one set of read­ers and com­mon sense by anoth­er, and that the groups will not break down along pre­dictable lines.
  6. How the inter­net has changed dat­ing (The Econ­o­mist): “…a 2013 study researchers from Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty and the Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go showed that mar­riages that start­ed online were less like­ly to end in break-up and were asso­ci­at­ed with high­er lev­els of sat­is­fac­tion than mar­riages of the same vin­tage between sim­i­lar cou­ples who had met offline: the dif­fer­ence was not huge, but it was sta­tis­ti­cal­ly sig­nif­i­cant.”
  7. What Trump Knew and Vot­ers Did­n’t (Conor Frieder­s­dorf, The Atlantic): “…Trump vot­ers went to the polls unaware that a sum exceed­ing most of their annu­al salaries was expend­ed to keep that [Trump paid off a porn star] from them. Even if the pay­ment had been total­ly legal, it would’ve con­sti­tut­ed a delib­er­ate, immoral, clas­si­cal­ly politi­cian-like effort to mis­lead vot­ers about the choice before them. But the pay­ment was not legal. It vio­lat­ed cam­paign-finance laws—and it was not a mere­ly acci­den­tal and tech­ni­cal vio­la­tion of an over­ly com­pli­cat­ed or con­tro­ver­sial pro­vi­sion.” This arti­cle is a pret­ty good and suc­cinct sum­ma­ry of the cur­rent debate about Trump.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have How Can I Learn To Receive – And Give – Crit­i­cism In Light Of The Cross?(Justin Tay­lor, Gospel Coali­tion): “A believ­er is one who iden­ti­fies with all that God affirms and con­demns in Christ’s cru­ci­fix­ion. In oth­er words, in Christ’s cross I agree with God’s judg­ment of me; and in Christ’s cross I agree with God’s jus­ti­fi­ca­tion of me. Both have a rad­i­cal impact on how we take and give crit­i­cism.” This is based on a longer arti­cle (4 page PDF). (first shared in vol­ume 63)

Why Do You Send This Email?

In the time of King David, the tribe of Issachar pro­duced shrewd war­riors “who under­stood the times and knew what Israel should do” (1 Chron 12:32). In a sim­i­lar way, we need to become wise peo­ple whose faith inter­acts with the world. I pray this email gives you greater insight, so that you may con­tin­ue the tra­di­tion of Issachar.

Disclaimer

Chi Alpha is not a par­ti­san orga­ni­za­tion. To para­phrase anoth­er min­is­ter: we are not about the donkey’s agen­da and we are not about the elephant’s agen­da — we are about the Lamb’s agen­da. Hav­ing said that, I read wide­ly (in part because I believe we should aspire to pass the ide­o­log­i­cal Tur­ing test and in part because I do not believe I can fair­ly say “I agree” or “I dis­agree” until I can say “I under­stand”) and may at times share arti­cles that have a strong par­ti­san bias sim­ply because I find the arti­cle stim­u­lat­ing. The upshot: you should not assume I agree with every­thing an author says in an arti­cle I men­tion, much less things the author has said in oth­er arti­cles (although if I strong­ly dis­agree with some­thing in the arti­cle I’ll usu­al­ly men­tion it).

Also, remem­ber that I’m not report­ing news — I’m giv­ing you a selec­tion of things I found inter­est­ing. There’s a lot hap­pen­ing in the world that’s not mak­ing an appear­ance here because I haven’t found stim­u­lat­ing arti­cles writ­ten about it.

If this was for­ward­ed to you and you want to receive future emails, sign up here. You can also view the archives.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 165

On Fri­days I share articles/resources about broad cul­tur­al, soci­etal and the­o­log­i­cal issues. Be sure to see the expla­na­tion and dis­claimers at the bot­tom. I wel­come your sug­ges­tions. If you read some­thing fas­ci­nat­ing please pass it my way.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Our Hope Is Com­ing (Steven Lon­go­ria, Deni­son Forum): “The world we live in would tell us that hope is close­ly tied to doubt. To say ‘I hope it doesn’t rain tomor­row’ car­ries with it a fear that it will like­ly rain…. Bib­li­cal hope is some­thing entire­ly dif­fer­ent. It con­veys a state of con­fi­dence, secu­ri­ty, and lack of wor­ry.” Steven is an alum­nus of our min­istry who is cur­rent­ly study­ing at Dal­las The­o­log­i­cal Sem­i­nary. Go, Steven!
  2. How the State Serves Both Sal­va­tion and Reli­gious Free­dom (Jonathan Lee­man, 9 Marks): “Two basic kinds of gov­ern­ments, then, show up in the Bible: those that shel­ter God’s peo­ple, and those that destroy them. Abim­elech shel­tered; Pharoah destroyed. The Assyr­i­ans destroyed; the Baby­lo­ni­ans and Per­sians, ulti­mate­ly, shel­tered. Pilate destroyed; Fes­tus shel­tered. And depend­ing on how you read Rev­e­la­tion, the his­to­ry of gov­ern­ment will cul­mi­nate in a beast­ly slaugh­ter of saint­ly blood. Romans 13 calls gov­ern­ments ser­vants; Psalm 2 calls them imposters. Most gov­ern­ments con­tain both. But some are bet­ter than oth­ers.” Rec­om­mend­ed.
  3. #Church­Too
    • What Would Jesus Do? Clean House In The Catholic Church. (Megan McAr­dle, Wash­ing­ton Post): “[Con­gre­gants] do not expect the church to be per­fect; even St. Peter, after all, denied Christ three times. But they do expect to find the reflec­tion of Christ there. Accord­ing to news reports, the church hier­ar­chy in Penn­syl­va­nia and beyond has already denied Christ’s gospel three times: once when it shel­tered preda­tors in silence; once when it failed to remove every­one who was involved in cov­er­ing up any crime; and again when two of the six dio­ce­ses involved tried to shut down the grand jury inves­ti­ga­tion that pro­duced the report. Now they face the same choice Peter did.” Straight fire.
    • Why Men Like Me Should Not Be Priests (Daniel Matt­son, First Things): “Most of the hor­rif­ic abuse detailed in the Penn­syl­va­nia Grand Jury report involved ado­les­cent boys and young men. This isn’t pedophil­ia…. If the Church wants to avoid sex scan­dals, it must stop ordain­ing the sorts of men who have the hard­est time remain­ing chaste.” This arti­cle is full of details I did not know. Fas­ci­nat­ing and no doubt a light­ning rod for con­tro­very.
    • How the Wil­low Creek Church Scan­dal Has Stunned the Evan­gel­i­cal World (Lau­rie Good­stein, New York Times): “The sud­den res­ig­na­tion of Wil­low Creek Com­mu­ni­ty Church’s top lead­ers fol­low­ing sex­u­al harass­ment alle­ga­tions against Rev. Bill Hybels, their found­ing pas­tor, has shak­en evan­gel­i­cals far from the church’s base in the Chica­go sub­urbs. There are few big­ger names in the evan­gel­i­cal world than Mr. Hybels, and few church­es more influ­en­tial than Wil­low Creek. Chris­tians world­wide looked to it as a mod­el of smart lead­er­ship.”
    • These two scan­dals are espe­cial­ly inter­est­ing when jux­ta­posed. The Roman Catholic Church is the most hier­ar­chi­cal of denom­i­na­tions with author­i­ty flow­ing down from the Pope. Wil­low Creek is a non­de­nom­i­na­tion­al con­gre­ga­tion and is com­plete­ly inde­pen­dent of exter­nal author­i­ty. They rep­re­sent two extremes of church gov­er­nance and the rev­e­la­tion of their moral fail­ures demon­strate that the prob­lem of sin is not solved by rules. See Colos­sians 2:20–23.
    • Relat­ed: Evan­gel­i­cal Puri­ty Cul­ture Taught Me to Ratio­nal­ize My Sex­u­al Assault (Bec­ca Andrews, Moth­er Jones): “I under­stood my role: I was a sex­u­al gate­keep­er. Men, we were taught, are bur­dened by God with insa­tiable lust. Women, of course, are not, so it makes sense that we are expect­ed to cre­ate the bound­aries. We are respon­si­ble for what we wear, but more broad­ly, we are tasked with defin­ing con­sent, as thorny as that may seem…. The stakes are high in puri­ty cul­ture. Every slipup is a strike against any hope of a suc­cess­ful mar­riage.” Although inter­est­ing, the arti­cle doesn’t quite make the case that the title implies.
    • For the record: nev­er keep a crim­i­nal mat­ter pri­vate because you fear your report will hurt the pub­lic per­cep­tion of a reli­gious body, polit­i­cal enti­ty, or any oth­er insti­tu­tion. Souls are eter­nal, orga­ni­za­tions are not. Indi­vid­u­als are more impor­tant than insti­tu­tions. This is true even of denom­i­na­tions and indi­vid­ual con­gre­ga­tions — Jesus died for the Church and not for a brand. 1 Corinthi­ans 6:1–7 tells us to for­bear in civ­il mat­ters, but when it comes to crim­i­nal mat­ters Romans 13:1–7 is the rel­e­vant pas­sage.
  4. Social Injus­tice and the Gospel (John MacArthur, Grace To You): “I am con­vinced the only long-term solu­tion to every brand of eth­nic ani­mus is the gospel of Jesus Christ. In Christ alone are the bar­ri­ers and divid­ing walls between peo­ple groups bro­ken down, the enmi­ty abol­ished, and dif­fer­ing cul­tures and eth­nic groups bound togeth­er in one new peo­ple (Eph­esians 2:14–15). The black lead­ers with whom I min­is­tered dur­ing the civ­il rights move­ment shared that con­vic­tion. The evan­gel­i­cals who are say­ing the most and talk­ing the loud­est these days about what’s referred to as ‘social jus­tice’ seem to have a very dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive.” This is appar­ent­ly the first in a series.
  5. “Let The Whore­house Burn!” (Christo­pher Cald­well, The Week­ly Stan­dard): “‘As of this evening,’ said Pierre Moscovi­ci in Lux­em­bourg in June, ‘the Greek cri­sis is over.’ Moscovi­ci, a French Social­ist politi­cian who serves as the eco­nom­ics com­mis­sion­er of the Euro­pean Union, was mak­ing quite a claim…. Today, despite what Pierre Moscovi­ci and his col­leagues said in Lux­em­bourg, Greek debt, at 179 per­cent, is high­er still. The lat­est E.U. deal requires Greece to run large bud­get sur­plus­es until the year 2060 to repay the debts brought on by the E.U.’s own mis­man­age­ment. The coun­try is in some respects worse off than it was when Greek pro­test­ers mobbed the par­lia­ment in May 2010, howl­ing, ‘Let the whore­house burn!’”
  6. Norway’s hid­den scan­dal (Tim Whewell, BBC): “His con­vic­tion puts the spot­light back on a sys­tem which has been heav­i­ly crit­i­cised by some par­ents – and by lead­ing Nor­we­gian pro­fes­sion­als in the child­care field – for being too quick to put chil­dren into care, split­ting fam­i­lies unnec­es­sar­i­ly. The dis­graced psy­chi­a­trist has had his pro­fes­sion­al licence revoked, mean­ing he can­not work in the same field again. But par­ents who’ve lost cus­tody of chil­dren in cas­es he was involved in believe all his pre­vi­ous deci­sions should be reviewed.” This is out­ra­geous.
  7. Col­orado Defies the Supreme Court, Renews Per­se­cu­tion of a Chris­t­ian Bak­er (David French, Nation­al Review): “On the very day that Phillips won his case at the Supreme Court, a per­son emailed with yet anoth­er delib­er­ate­ly offen­sive design request: “I’m think­ing a three-tiered white cake. Cheese­cake frost­ing. And the top­per should be a large fig­ure of Satan, lick­ing a 9″ black Dil­do. I would like the dil­do to be an actu­al work­ing mod­el, that can be turned on before we unveil the cake. I can pro­vide it for you if you don’t have the means to pro­cure one your­self.” And final­ly, two days lat­er, a per­son iden­ti­fy­ing as ‘Autumn Marie’ vis­it­ed Phillips’s shop and request­ed a cake fea­tur­ing a pen­ta­gram. Accord­ing to ADF, ‘Phillips believes that per­son was Autumn Scar­di­na.’ Rather than rec­og­niz­ing Scardina’s con­duct as noth­ing more than a bad-faith cam­paign of harass­ment, Aubrey Ele­nis, the direc­tor of the Col­orado Civ­il Rights Divi­sion, found on June 28 ‘prob­a­ble cause’ to believe that Phillips vio­lat­ed Scardina’s civ­il rights….”
    • Relat­ed: When oppo­si­tion to reli­gious lib­er­ty becomes sil­ly, pet­ty, and vin­dic­tive (Andrew T. Walk­er. Ethics and Reli­gious Lib­er­ty Com­mis­sion): “When our cre­ative direc­tor walked into my office to noti­fy me [that our min­istry was being dis­crim­i­nat­ed against by a com­pa­ny], my first response was to smile. Why? Because the ERLC had been the vic­tim of dis­crim­i­na­tion, and I knew an oppor­tu­ni­ty like this meant the ERLC could pur­sue the moral high ground. What pro­gres­sivism does to dis­senters, we would not do to them…. No law­suit was nec­es­sary. No media storm was called for. We have zero desire to force the dis­crim­i­nat­ing com­pa­ny to agree with us or com­ply with our demands. No one was hold­ing the oth­er hostage to their ide­o­log­i­cal expec­ta­tions. The pow­er of choice and the free­dom of view­point diver­si­ty allowed two actors to pur­sue a path­way of plu­ral­ism.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have Every Place Has Detrac­tors. Con­sid­er Where They’re Com­ing From.(Megan McAr­dle, Bloomberg View): “There is grave dan­ger in judg­ing a neigh­bor­hood, or a cul­ture, by the accounts of those who chose to leave it. Those peo­ple are least like­ly to appre­ci­ate the good things about where they came from, and the most like­ly to dwell on its less attrac­tive qual­i­ties.” Bear this in mind when lis­ten­ing to con­ver­sion tes­ti­monies (both sec­u­lar and reli­gious). This serendip­i­tous­ly hap­pened to be next in the sequence of old­er links. It fits very well with the above arti­cle about evan­gel­i­cal puri­ty cul­ture. (first shared in vol­ume 62)

Why Do You Send This Email?

In the time of King David, the tribe of Issachar pro­duced shrewd war­riors “who under­stood the times and knew what Israel should do” (1 Chron 12:32). In a sim­i­lar way, we need to become wise peo­ple whose faith inter­acts with the world. I pray this email gives you greater insight, so that you may con­tin­ue the tra­di­tion of Issachar.

Disclaimer

Chi Alpha is not a par­ti­san orga­ni­za­tion. To para­phrase anoth­er min­is­ter: we are not about the donkey’s agen­da and we are not about the elephant’s agen­da — we are about the Lamb’s agen­da. Hav­ing said that, I read wide­ly (in part because I believe we should aspire to pass the ide­o­log­i­cal Tur­ing test and in part because I do not believe I can fair­ly say “I agree” or “I dis­agree” until I can say “I under­stand”) and may at times share arti­cles that have a strong par­ti­san bias sim­ply because I find the arti­cle stim­u­lat­ing. The upshot: you should not assume I agree with every­thing an author says in an arti­cle I men­tion, much less things the author has said in oth­er arti­cles (although if I strong­ly dis­agree with some­thing in the arti­cle I’ll usu­al­ly men­tion it).

Also, remem­ber that I’m not report­ing news — I’m giv­ing you a selec­tion of things I found inter­est­ing. There’s a lot hap­pen­ing in the world that’s not mak­ing an appear­ance here because I haven’t found stim­u­lat­ing arti­cles writ­ten about it.

If this was for­ward­ed to you and you want to receive future emails, sign up here. You can also view the archives.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 164

On Fri­days I share articles/resources about broad cul­tur­al, soci­etal and the­o­log­i­cal issues. Be sure to see the expla­na­tion and dis­claimers at the bot­tom. I wel­come your sug­ges­tions. If you read some­thing fas­ci­nat­ing please pass it my way.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Two con­trast­ing per­spec­tives on who is real­ly win­ning in Amer­i­ca, both inde­pen­dent­ly pub­lished by smart peo­ple in the same high-pro­file mag­a­zine:
    • Why the Left Is So Afraid of Jor­dan Peter­son (Caitlin Flana­gan, The Atlantic): “There are many legit­i­mate rea­sons to dis­agree with him on a num­ber of sub­jects, and many peo­ple of good will do. But there is no coher­ent rea­son for the left’s oblit­er­at­ing and irra­tional hatred of Jor­dan Peter­son. What, then, accounts for it? It is because the left, while it cur­rent­ly seems ascen­dant in our hous­es of cul­ture and art, has in fact entered its deca­dent late phase, and it is deeply vul­ner­a­ble.”
    • Con­ser­v­a­tives Are Scared, Even Under Trump (Emma Green, The Atlantic): “While lib­er­al activist groups paint Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump’s Wash­ing­ton as an unmit­i­gat­ed for­ward march of con­ser­v­a­tive vic­to­ries, con­ser­v­a­tive activist groups—including Weber’s—don’t nec­es­sar­i­ly per­ceive things the same way. Rather, some of these groups see the next few years under Trump as a brief win­dow of oppor­tu­ni­ty to cre­ate defens­es against a cul­ture that is mov­ing away from them. In parts of the con­ser­v­a­tive move­ment, the long-game strat­e­gy is to defend their posi­tion by devolv­ing pow­er away from the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment and the Supreme Court, using the momen­tum of the Trump years to bat­ten down the hatch­es against the inevitable cul­tur­al storms ahead.”
  2. Final text of Jew­ish nation-state law, approved by the Knes­set ear­ly on July 19 (Raoul Wootliff, Times of Israel): “The law for the first time enshrines Israel as ‘the nation­al home of the Jew­ish peo­ple.’ The law becomes one of the so-called Basic Laws, which, like a con­sti­tu­tion, guide Israel’s legal sys­tem and are usu­al­ly more dif­fi­cult to repeal than reg­u­lar laws.” Unlike most arti­cles, this includes the full (trans­lat­ed) text of the law, and it is worth read­ing if you’ve only seen it excerpt­ed. It’s not long.
    • I believe this is the Israeli law that infu­ri­at­ed Stan­ford stu­dent Hamzeh Daoud (see last week’s install­ment for details).
    • Israel’s New Law: A Tale of Two Nation-States (Robert Nichol­son, Prov­i­dence): “The Pales­tine Basic Law (2003) defines Pales­tine as part of the Arab world and Arab uni­ty as a sin­gu­lar goal of the Pales­tin­ian peo­ple. The law also defines Ara­bic as Palestine’s offi­cial lan­guage, Jerusalem as its offi­cial cap­i­tal, and Islam as its offi­cial reli­gion. This basic law serves as a tem­po­rary con­sti­tu­tion for the Pales­tin­ian Author­i­ty until a sov­er­eign State of Pales­tine is estab­lished. In the mean­time, the law gov­erns dai­ly life inside the West Bank and to some extent Gaza. On July 19 the Israeli Knes­set passed a sim­i­lar basic law.” This was incred­i­bly help­ful con­text to me.
    • Under the Law: Israeli Chris­tians Wor­ry About Sec­ondary Sta­tus in Jew­ish Nation-State (Jayson Casper, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “‘This law out­lines that Israel’s demo­c­ra­t­ic val­ues are sec­ondary for non-Jews,’ said Sha­dia Qubti, a Pales­tin­ian evan­gel­i­cal liv­ing in Nazareth. ‘It sends a clear mes­sage that my lan­guage is not wel­come and con­se­quent­ly, nei­ther is my cul­tur­al and eth­nic iden­ti­ty.’”
  3. A Bet­ter Way to Ban Alex Jones (David French, New York Times): “The good news is that tech com­pa­nies don’t have to rely on vague, mal­leable and hot­ly con­test­ed def­i­n­i­tions of hate speech to deal with con­spir­a­cy the­o­rists like Mr. Jones. The far bet­ter option would be to pro­hib­it libel or slan­der on their plat­forms…. Pri­vate cor­po­ra­tions can ban who­ev­er they like. But if com­pa­nies like Face­book are eager to nav­i­gate speech con­tro­ver­sies in good faith, they would do well to learn from the cen­turies of legal devel­op­ments in Amer­i­can law. When cre­at­ing a true mar­ket­place of ideas, why not let the First Amend­ment be your guide?”
    • His fol­low-up: A First Amend­ment Peace Plan for the Twit­ter Wars (David French, Nation­al Review): “As I dug down into objec­tions to my pro­posed First Amend­ment frame­work, I often found that the objec­tions were ulti­mate­ly based on a desire to dis­crim­i­nate on the basis of view­point, on a desire to use the pow­er of the plat­form to priv­i­lege some voic­es and sup­press oth­ers.”
  4. A Kind of Home­less­ness: Evan­gel­i­cals of Col­or in the Trump Era (Melani McAl­is­ter, Reli­gion & Pol­i­tics): “Yet the head­lines about ‘evan­gel­i­cal’ sup­port for the pres­i­dent and his agen­da mean that evan­gel­i­cals of col­or can seem to be an invis­i­ble community—rarely acknowl­edged by jour­nal­ists even when they go to the same church­es or claim a sim­i­lar the­ol­o­gy. White evan­gel­i­cals are numer­i­cal­ly dominant—although declining—but their opin­ions dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly dom­i­nate U.S. media report­ing on how the­o­log­i­cal­ly con­ser­v­a­tive Protes­tants think, vote, and believe. At one lev­el, the racial dif­fer­ence is emi­nent­ly pre­dictable. Sure­ly the white­ness of white evan­gel­i­cals is cru­cial to under­stand­ing their polit­i­cal beliefs and their vot­ing pat­terns. As Janelle Wong shows in her new book, Immi­grants, Evan­gel­i­cals, and Pol­i­tics in an Era of Demo­graph­ic Change, although evan­gel­i­cals of any giv­en race are more con­ser­v­a­tive than the gen­er­al pop­u­la­tion of that race, evan­gel­i­cals of col­or over­all are far less con­ser­v­a­tive than white evan­gel­i­cals. Indeed, they are less con­ser­v­a­tive than white peo­ple over­all.” The author is a pro­fes­sor of Amer­i­can Stud­ies and Inter­na­tion­al Affairs at George Wash­ing­ton Uni­ver­si­ty.
  5. How Trump Rad­i­cal­ized ICE (Franklin Foer, The Atlantic): “By the begin­ning of Barack Obama’s sec­ond term, immi­gra­tion had become one of the high­est pri­or­i­ties of fed­er­al law enforce­ment: Half of all fed­er­al pros­e­cu­tions were for immi­gra­tion-relat­ed crimes. In 2012, Con­gress appro­pri­at­ed $18 bil­lion for immi­gra­tion enforce­ment. It spent $14 bil­lion for all the oth­er major crim­i­nal law-enforce­ment agen­cies com­bined: the FBI; the Drug Enforce­ment Admin­is­tra­tion; the Secret Ser­vice; the Bureau of Alco­hol, Tobac­co, Firearms, and Explo­sives; and the U.S. Mar­shals Ser­vice.” ICE is much, much big­ger than I real­ized. This is a real­ly impor­tant arti­cle.
  6. Oh, The Human­i­ties! (Ross Douthat, New York Times): “…the years since the Great Reces­sion have been ‘bru­tal for almost every major in the human­i­ties.’ They’ve also been bad for ‘social sci­ence fields that most close­ly resem­ble human­is­tic ones — soci­ol­o­gy, anthro­pol­o­gy, inter­na­tion­al rela­tions and polit­i­cal sci­ence.’ Mean­while the sci­ences and engi­neer­ing have gained at the expense of human­ism…”
  7. Bethel Church Sur­vives Red­ding Carr Fire, But Still Faces Heat (Grif­fin Paul Jack­son, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “For Bethel’s part, staff said the church could not act as an evac­u­a­tion zone because of its prox­im­i­ty to the blaze and because there is a sin­gle entry and exit point to the cam­pus, which is itself sur­round­ed by brush. The Red Cross said Bethel offered to be an evac­u­a­tion site, but was turned down because of the campus’s near­ness to the fire…. The church has, how­ev­er, flexed its con­sid­er­able min­istry mus­cle and finan­cial resources, encour­ag­ing dona­tions to aid relief efforts. Bethel is also part­ner­ing with the Red Cross and the Sal­va­tion Army in response to the Carr fire, Far­rel­ly said.”
    • Relat­ed: Osteen’s church was sim­i­lar­ly crit­i­cized after Hur­ri­cane Har­vey, also with what seem to me to be scant fac­tu­al grounds. Dis­cussed back in vol­ume 116.
    • Also (ten­u­ous­ly) relat­ed: Cal­i­for­ni­a’s Dev­as­tat­ing Fires Are Man-Caused — But Not In The Way They Tell Us (Chuck DeVore, Forbes): “ In the 1850s and 1860s, the typ­i­cal Sier­ra land­scape was of open fields of grass punc­tu­at­ed by iso­lat­ed pine stands and a few scat­tered oak trees. The first branch­es on the pine trees start­ed about 20 feet up—lower branch­es hav­ing been burned off by low-inten­si­ty grass­fires. California’s Native Amer­i­can pop­u­la­tion had for years shaped this land­scape with fire to encour­age the grass­lands and boost the game ani­mal pop­u­la­tion. As the Gold Rush remade mod­ern Cal­i­for­nia, tim­ber was har­vest­ed and replant­ed. Fires were sup­pressed because they threat­ened homes as well as burned up a valu­able resource. The land­scape filled in with trees, but the trees were har­vest­ed every 30 to 50 years. In the 1990s, how­ev­er, that cycle began to be dis­rupt­ed with increas­ing­ly bur­den­some reg­u­la­tions. The tim­ber har­vest cycle slowed, and, in some areas, stopped com­plete­ly, espe­cial­ly on the almost 60% of Cal­i­for­nia for­est land owned by the fed­er­al gov­ern­ment.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have Mak­ing Sense of the Num­bers of Gen­e­sis [pdf link] (Car­ol Hill, Per­spec­tives on Sci­ence and the Chris­t­ian Faith): “Joseph and Joshua were each record­ed as dying at age 110—a num­ber con­sid­ered ‘per­fect’ by the Egyp­tians. In ancient Egypt­ian doc­trine, the phrase ‘he died aged 110’ was actu­al­ly an epi­taph com­mem­o­rat­ing a life that had been lived self­less­ly and had result­ed in out­stand­ing social and moral ben­e­fit for oth­ers. And so for both Joseph and Joshua, who came out of the Egypt­ian cul­ture, quot­ing this age was actu­al­ly a trib­ute to their char­ac­ter. But, to be described as ‘dying at age 110’ bore no nec­es­sary rela­tion­ship to the actu­al time of an individual’s life span.” You will not agree with every­thing in this arti­cle, but it is full of fas­ci­nat­ing insights. (first shared in vol­ume 51)

Why Do You Send This Email?

In the time of King David, the tribe of Issachar pro­duced shrewd war­riors “who under­stood the times and knew what Israel should do” (1 Chron 12:32). In a sim­i­lar way, we need to become wise peo­ple whose faith inter­acts with the world. I pray this email gives you greater insight, so that you may con­tin­ue the tra­di­tion of Issachar.

Disclaimer

Chi Alpha is not a par­ti­san orga­ni­za­tion. To para­phrase anoth­er min­is­ter: we are not about the donkey’s agen­da and we are not about the elephant’s agen­da — we are about the Lamb’s agen­da. Hav­ing said that, I read wide­ly (in part because I believe we should aspire to pass the ide­o­log­i­cal Tur­ing test and in part because I do not believe I can fair­ly say “I agree” or “I dis­agree” until I can say “I under­stand”) and may at times share arti­cles that have a strong par­ti­san bias sim­ply because I find the arti­cle stim­u­lat­ing. The upshot: you should not assume I agree with every­thing an author says in an arti­cle I men­tion, much less things the author has said in oth­er arti­cles (although if I strong­ly dis­agree with some­thing in the arti­cle I’ll usu­al­ly men­tion it).

Also, remem­ber that I’m not report­ing news — I’m giv­ing you a selec­tion of things I found inter­est­ing. There’s a lot hap­pen­ing in the world that’s not mak­ing an appear­ance here because I haven’t found stim­u­lat­ing arti­cles writ­ten about it.

If this was for­ward­ed to you and you want to receive future emails, sign up here. You can also view the archives.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 163

On Fri­days I share articles/resources about broad cul­tur­al, soci­etal and the­o­log­i­cal issues. Be sure to see the expla­na­tion and dis­claimers at the bot­tom. I wel­come your sug­ges­tions. If you read some­thing fas­ci­nat­ing please pass it my way.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Chi­na and its creepy facial recog­ni­tion tech­nol­o­gy tar­gets Uighur Mus­lims (Julia Duin, GetRe­li­gion): “China’s Mus­lims are akin to Germany’s Jews in the 1930s; a group of hap­less peo­ple of a dif­fer­ent reli­gion that the gov­ern­ment gets to exper­i­ment on. They’re already shov­ing rough­ly 800,000 Mus­lims into intern­ment camps and oth­er Mus­lims world­wide aren’t real­ly notic­ing.” This is hor­ri­fy­ing.
  2. There was quite the clam­or recent­ly about anti­semitism at Stan­ford.
    • Stan­ford Stu­dent Threat­ens Vio­lence against Pro-Israel Stu­dents (Dov Green­burg, Nation­al Review): “In mid July, Hamzeh Daoud, a stu­dent at Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty, pub­licly post­ed on Face­book: ‘I’m gonna phys­i­cal­ly fight Zion­ists on cam­pus next year.’ If his mean­ing wasn’t clear enough, Hamzeh con­tin­ued, ‘And after I abol­ish your ass I’ll go ahead and work every day for the rest of my life to abol­ish your pet­ty ass eth­no-suprema­cist, set­tler-colo­nial state.’ While not reflec­tive of Stanford’s val­ues, the sen­ti­ment of this hate­ful post reveals the state of con­tem­po­rary life on cam­pus­es.”
    • Daoud resigns from Nor­cliffe RA posi­tion (Julia Ingram and Hold­en Fore­man, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “Hamzeh Daoud ’20 has resigned from his Res­i­dent Assis­tant posi­tion in Nor­cliffe House, he announced in a state­ment to The Dai­ly on Fri­day after­noon.”
    • Op Ed: State­ment from Hamzeh Daoud (Hamzeh Daoud, Stan­ford Dai­ly): “After spend­ing a few hours away from Face­book, I read over my post again and real­ized how infused it was with the same hatred that has caused my own fam­i­ly so much suf­fer­ing. It was the antithe­sis of why I chose this path in life. A slop­py com­ment made dur­ing an emo­tion-filled reac­tion to yet anoth­er lay­er of trau­ma, the com­ment did not con­vey my val­ues, who I am cur­rent­ly, or who I hope to become.”
    • I know some of you know Hamzeh, so this prob­a­bly feels a good deal more per­son­al than many of the arti­cles I share. Please remem­ber that what you put on social media actu­al­ly mat­ters. James 1:19 is a use­ful mem­o­ry verse for every­one with a Face­book or Twit­ter account: “My dear broth­ers and sis­ters, take note of this: Every­one should be quick to lis­ten, slow to speak and slow to become angry.”
  3. At Prayer Break­fast, Guests Seek Access to a Dif­fer­ent High­er Pow­er (Ken­neth P. Vogel and Eliz­a­beth Dias, New York Times): “Some describe the gath­er­ing as sim­i­lar to the World Eco­nom­ic Forum, except that Jesus is the orga­niz­ing principle….With its rel­a­tive lack of diplo­mat­ic pro­to­cols and press cov­er­age, the prayer break­fast set­ting is ide­al for for­eign fig­ures who might not oth­er­wise be able to eas­i­ly get face time with top Amer­i­can offi­cials, because of unsa­vory rep­u­ta­tions or a lack of an offi­cial gov­ern­ment perch, accord­ing to lob­by­ists who help arrange such trips. They also con­tend that it is eas­i­er to secure visas when the break­fast is list­ed as a des­ti­na­tion.”
  4. Jeff Ses­sions announces a reli­gious lib­er­ty task force to com­bat “dan­ger­ous” sec­u­lar­ism (Tara Isabel­la Bur­ton, Vox): “In a bold speech deliv­ered at the Jus­tice Department’s Reli­gious Lib­er­ty Sum­mit, Ses­sions char­ac­ter­ized the task force as a nec­es­sary step in fac­ing down the pre­vail­ing forces of sec­u­lar­ism. ‘A dan­ger­ous move­ment, unde­tect­ed by many, is now chal­leng­ing and erod­ing our great tra­di­tion of reli­gious free­dom,’ he said, which ‘must be con­front­ed and defeat­ed.’”
    • Relat­ed: Why Jeff Ses­sions thinks Chris­tians are under siege in Amer­i­ca (Christo­pher Shea inter­views Nel­son Tebbe, Vox): One part stood out to me: “The Supreme Court has not decid­ed a reli­gious free­dom case in a way that’s adverse to the inter­est of Chris­tians for the past few terms. I can’t think of a sin­gle reli­gious free­dom case that they’ve lost.”
    • The above point is very mud­dled. The things that keep going to the Supreme Court are pre­cise­ly the things we have a prob­lem with. Do you know what we don’t have a prob­lem with? Can­ni­bal­ism. We’ve got cul­tur­al con­sen­sus on that. But reli­gious lib­er­ty? That keeps going to the courts and get­ting suc­cess­ful­ly appealed to the very top because local and state gov­ern­ments keep try­ing to vio­late it. It is a sim­ple fact that sig­nif­i­cant voic­es in our cul­ture view reli­gious lib­er­ty with reac­tions rang­ing from sus­pi­cion to hos­til­i­ty. Exam­ples abound (includ­ing these two Vox arti­cles).
  5. How Catholic Bish­ops Are Shap­ing Health Care In Rur­al Amer­i­ca (Anna Maria Bar­ry-Jester and Amelia Thom­son-DeVeaux, FiveThir­tyEight): “Best esti­mates sug­gest that one in six hos­pi­tal beds and many of the nation’s largest non­prof­it health sys­tems are Catholic-owned or ‑affil­i­at­ed. From 2001 to 2016, the num­ber of Catholic-affil­i­at­ed hos­pi­tals in the U.S. grew by 22 per­cent, even as the total num­ber of hos­pi­tals in the U.S. shrunk, accord­ing to research by Merg­er­Watch and the Amer­i­can Civ­il Lib­er­ties Union.”
    • A response: Stan­dard Pro­ce­dures (Leah Libresco Sargeant, First Things): “When she lays out my options, there real­ly is just one option: the stan­dard of repro­duc­tive care. But I have two rea­sons to say no: I am a Catholic and I am a sta­tis­ti­cian. It was faith and rea­son, the two ways of know­ing that St. John Paul II called the ‘two wings on which the human spir­it ris­es to the con­tem­pla­tion of truth,’ that led me to dig in my heels dur­ing my third mis­car­riage.” FYI: the author used to write for FiveThir­tyEight.
    • Anoth­er response: What FiveThir­tyEight gets wrong about Catholic hos­pi­tals (Stephanie Slade, Amer­i­ca Mag­a­zine): “That the A.C.L.U. threw away its com­mit­ment to reli­gious free­dom in the name of abor­tion rights is bad enough. A jour­nal­is­tic enter­prise as osten­si­bly sane and data-dri­ven as FiveThir­tyEight­should think twice before fol­low­ing the same path.”
  6. “Hyp­not­ic Mass Phe­nom­e­na” (Flo­ri­an Schwab inter­view with Peter Thiel, Die Welt­woche): “The advanced tech­no­log­i­cal civ­i­liza­tion of the ear­ly 21st cen­tu­ry is a com­pli­cat­ed world where it is not pos­si­ble for any­body to think through every­thing for them­selves. You can­not be a poly­math in quite the way peo­ple were in the 18th cen­tu­ry enlight­en­ments. You can­not be like Goethe. So there is some need to lis­ten to experts, to defer to oth­er peo­ple. And then, there is always the dan­ger of that going too far and peo­ple not think­ing crit­i­cal­ly. This hap­pens in spades in Sil­i­con Val­ley.”
  7. Spies Are More Com­mon, and Bor­ing, Than You Think (Tyler Cowen, Bloomberg Opin­ion): “John Negro­ponte, for­mer direc­tor of nation­al intel­li­gence, admit­ted in 2006 that the U.S. was deploy­ing about 100,000 spies around the world. Giv­en that the U.S. is the world’s tech­nol­o­gy and mil­i­tary leader, and yet has a rel­a­tive­ly small share of glob­al pop­u­la­tion, is it so crazy to think the num­ber of peo­ple spy­ing on us is larg­er than that?”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have The Weight of Glo­ry (C.S. Lewis): It was orig­i­nal­ly preached as a ser­mon and then print­ed in a the­ol­o­gy mag­a­zine. Relat­ed: see the C. S. Lewis Doo­dle YouTube chan­nel – it’s real­ly good! (first shared in vol­ume 36)

Why Do You Send This Email?

In the time of King David, the tribe of Issachar pro­duced shrewd war­riors “who under­stood the times and knew what Israel should do” (1 Chron 12:32). In a sim­i­lar way, we need to become wise peo­ple whose faith inter­acts with the world. I pray this email gives you greater insight, so that you may con­tin­ue the tra­di­tion of Issachar.

Disclaimer

Chi Alpha is not a par­ti­san orga­ni­za­tion. To para­phrase anoth­er min­is­ter: we are not about the donkey’s agen­da and we are not about the elephant’s agen­da — we are about the Lamb’s agen­da. Hav­ing said that, I read wide­ly (in part because I believe we should aspire to pass the ide­o­log­i­cal Tur­ing test and in part because I do not believe I can fair­ly say “I agree” or “I dis­agree” until I can say “I under­stand”) and may at times share arti­cles that have a strong par­ti­san bias sim­ply because I find the arti­cle stim­u­lat­ing. The upshot: you should not assume I agree with every­thing an author says in an arti­cle I men­tion, much less things the author has said in oth­er arti­cles (although if I strong­ly dis­agree with some­thing in the arti­cle I’ll usu­al­ly men­tion it).

Also, remem­ber that I’m not report­ing news — I’m giv­ing you a selec­tion of things I found inter­est­ing. There’s a lot hap­pen­ing in the world that’s not mak­ing an appear­ance here because I haven’t found stim­u­lat­ing arti­cles writ­ten about it.

If this was for­ward­ed to you and you want to receive future emails, sign up here. You can also view the archives.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 162

On Fri­days I share articles/resources about broad cul­tur­al, soci­etal and the­o­log­i­cal issues. Be sure to see the expla­na­tion and dis­claimers at the bot­tom. I wel­come your sug­ges­tions. If you read some­thing fas­ci­nat­ing please pass it my way.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. How to Wit­ness to a Dis­tract­ed World (O. Alan Noble, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “Let me give you a sce­nario. I believe it’s entire­ly pos­si­ble today to sit down with a non-believ­ing friend and have a pas­sion­ate, lengthy con­ver­sa­tion about the gospel and nev­er plant a seed deeply. Because as soon as you both rise from the table, he pulls out his phone and checks Face­book or responds to a text from his wife…. It was all a kind of rhetor­i­cal dance or game that we play. And the pri­ma­ry pur­pose of the dance is not to win over the oth­er per­son but to define your iden­ti­ty. The game is called expres­sive indi­vid­u­al­ism. And most of us play it.”
  2. A Glob­al Guide To State-Spon­sored Trolling (Michael Riley, Lau­ren Etter, and Bib­hu­dat­ta Prad­han, Bloomberg): “‘Peo­ple some­times wor­ry that Azer­bai­jan will shut down Face­book,’ said Katy Pearce, a com­mu­ni­ca­tions pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Wash­ing­ton who has stud­ied the plat­for­m’s use in that coun­try. ‘Why would it? Face­book is the most effec­tive tool of con­trol the gov­ern­ment has.’”
  3. Hous­ing Costs Reduce The Returns To Edu­ca­tion (Tyler Cowen, Mar­gin­al Rev­o­lu­tion): “The return to edu­ca­tion, for exam­ple, has increased in the Unit­ed States but it’s less well appre­ci­at­ed that in order to earn high wages col­lege edu­cat­ed work­ers must increas­ing­ly live in expen­sive cities. One con­se­quence is that the net col­lege wage pre­mi­um is not as large as it appears and inequal­i­ty has been over-esti­mat­ed.”
  4. The many deaths of lib­er­al­ism (Daniel Cole and Aure­lian Craiu­tu, Aeon): “The prob­lem for any­one declar­ing the death of lib­er­al­ism is that it has not one but sev­er­al pil­lars and dimen­sions: legal, polit­i­cal, eco­nom­ic and moral (or reli­gious). The weak­en­ing or dis­ap­pear­ance of one or two lib­er­al pil­lars or tenets would not be enough to declare lib­er­al­ism as a whole dead.”
  5. Epis­toc­ra­cy: a polit­i­cal theorist’s case for let­ting only the informed vote (Sean Illing inter­view­ing Jason Bren­nan, Vox): “I like to say I’m a fan of democ­ra­cy, and I’m also a fan of Iron Maid­en, but I think Iron Maid­en has quite a few albums that are ter­ri­ble — and I think democ­ra­cy is kind of like this. It’s great, it’s the best sys­tem we have so far, but we shouldn’t accept that it can’t be improved.” The title is inac­cu­rate — Bren­nan goes so far as to favor extend­ing the right to vote to chil­dren.
  6. The Trump Admin­is­tra­tion Con­venes the ‘Super Bowl’ of Reli­gious Free­dom (Emma Green, The Atlantic): “This min­is­te­r­i­al, which is real­ly just a fan­cy word for ‘big meet­ing,’ could be inter­pret­ed as the unveil­ing of an ele­ment of the Trump administration’s for­eign-pol­i­cy strat­e­gy. For the last three days, del­e­ga­tions from around the world have gath­ered to hear vic­tims of reli­gious per­se­cu­tion share their sto­ries. Amer­i­can offi­cials have declared in no uncer­tain terms that they believe the Unit­ed States should evan­ge­lize reli­gious lib­er­ty around the world, and that democ­ra­cy is built on a foun­da­tion of free­dom in faith.”
    • Relat­ed: Pence and Pom­peo Make Big Reli­gious Free­dom Pledges (Mor­gan Lee, Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “The Vice Pres­i­dent called out coun­tries across the globe, start­ing with Nicaragua where he accused the Orte­ga admin­is­tra­tion of ‘vir­tu­al­ly wag­ing war on the Catholic Church.’ He con­demned China’s per­se­cu­tion of its Tibetan Bud­dhists, Uyghur Mus­lims, and Chris­tians, as well as the actions of its author­i­tar­i­an neigh­bor: North Korea…. Pence also called out Iran. While acknowl­edg­ing that its Chris­tians, Jews, and Baha’i are all per­se­cut­ed by its Shia gov­ern­ment, he specif­i­cal­ly sin­gled out its Sun­ni Kurd pop­u­la­tion…. Russia’s Jehovah’s Wit­ness­es, who have been sub­ject to intense per­se­cu­tion in recent years, were also rec­og­nized by Pence…. The Vice Pres­i­dent also called for an end to anti-Semit­ic attacks in West­ern Europe.”
    • Relat­ed: Turkey Lets Andrew Brun­son Leave Prison (Chris­tian­i­ty Today)
    • Relat­ed: The World’s Next Reli­gious Free­dom Suc­cess Sto­ry: Uzbek­istan? (Chris­tian­i­ty Today): “‘That [pan­el was] dif­fer­ent than any­thing you’ve ever heard from almost any place in the for­mer Sovi­et Union,’ said Chris Seiple, pres­i­dent emer­i­tus of the Insti­tute for Glob­al Engage­ment, who orga­nized the pan­el and will lead a del­e­ga­tion to Uzbek­istan this fall. ‘… They’re insti­tu­tion­al­iz­ing the process of change. That’s the key. The process is the goal.’”
  7. Is There Recourse When Fact Check­ers Get It Wrong? (Kalev Lee­taru, Real­Clear­Pol­i­tics): “In short, through the busi­ness deci­sion of a sin­gle Sil­i­con Val­ley cor­po­ra­tion, fact check­ers have been ele­vat­ed from help­ful ref­er­ence librar­i­ans into a posi­tion of ulti­mate arbi­tra­tor of truth in our online world, with­out the atten­dant checks and bal­ances to mit­i­gate abuse.”

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have No Food Is Healthy. Not Even Kale. (Michael Ruhlman, Wash­ing­ton Post): Peo­ple can be healthy. Food can be nutri­tious. This is a won­der­ful essay about how we mis­use lan­guage to our detri­ment. If you’re sur­prised I includ­ed this, I believe that our cul­ture has a qua­si-reli­gious rela­tion­ship to health and to food, and I also believe that the use of lan­guage is pro­found­ly moral and that our cul­ture is a lin­guis­tic mess (to which I know of no fin­er guide than The Under­ground Gram­mar­i­an). (first shared in vol­ume 33)

Why Do You Send This Email?

In the time of King David, the tribe of Issachar pro­duced shrewd war­riors “who under­stood the times and knew what Israel should do” (1 Chron 12:32). In a sim­i­lar way, we need to become wise peo­ple whose faith inter­acts with the world. I pray this email gives you greater insight, so that you may con­tin­ue the tra­di­tion of Issachar.

Disclaimer

Chi Alpha is not a par­ti­san orga­ni­za­tion. To para­phrase anoth­er min­is­ter: we are not about the donkey’s agen­da and we are not about the elephant’s agen­da — we are about the Lamb’s agen­da. Hav­ing said that, I read wide­ly (in part because I believe we should aspire to pass the ide­o­log­i­cal Tur­ing test and in part because I do not believe I can fair­ly say “I agree” or “I dis­agree” until I can say “I under­stand”) and may at times share arti­cles that have a strong par­ti­san bias sim­ply because I find the arti­cle stim­u­lat­ing. The upshot: you should not assume I agree with every­thing an author says in an arti­cle I men­tion, much less things the author has said in oth­er arti­cles (although if I strong­ly dis­agree with some­thing in the arti­cle I’ll usu­al­ly men­tion it).

Also, remem­ber that I’m not report­ing news — I’m giv­ing you a selec­tion of things I found inter­est­ing. There’s a lot hap­pen­ing in the world that’s not mak­ing an appear­ance here because I haven’t found stim­u­lat­ing arti­cles writ­ten about it.

If this was for­ward­ed to you and you want to receive future emails, sign up here. You can also view the archives.

Things Glen Found Interesting, Volume 161

On Fri­days I share articles/resources about broad cul­tur­al, soci­etal and the­o­log­i­cal issues. Be sure to see the expla­na­tion and dis­claimers at the bot­tom. I wel­come your sug­ges­tions. If you read some­thing fas­ci­nat­ing please pass it my way.

Things Glen Found Interesting

  1. Trevor Responds To Crit­i­cism From The French Ambas­sador (Trevor Noah, YouTube): this is a wit­ty and insight­ful 8 minute reflec­tion on the inter­play between eth­nic her­itage and nation­al iden­ti­ty and the ways that Amer­i­cans process things dif­fer­ent­ly than the French.
  2. The New York Yan­kees Are A Moral Abom­i­na­tion (David Bent­ley Hart, New York Times): “Real­ly, how does a Yan­kees fan’s pride in all those pur­chased cham­pi­onships dif­fer from the self-delu­sion of a man stag­ger­ing out of a bawdy house at dawn, com­pli­ment­ing him­self on his mag­nif­i­cent pow­ers of seduc­tion?” A fun­ny piece of cul­tur­al com­men­tary in the New York Times writ­ten by a the­olo­gian? Yes, please. This col­umn is about way more than base­ball.
  3. Uncom­fort­able Ques­tions in the Wake of Rus­sia Indict­ment 2.0 and Trump’s Press Con­fer­ence With Putin (Jack Gold­smith, Law­fare): “It is no response to say that the Unit­ed States doesn’t med­dle in for­eign elec­tions, because it has in the past—at least as recent­ly as Bill Clinton’s inter­ven­tion in the Russ­ian pres­i­den­tial elec­tion of 1996 and pos­si­bly as recent­ly as the Hillary Clin­ton State Department’s alleged inter­ven­tion in Russia’s 2011 leg­isla­tive elec­tions. And dur­ing the Cold War the Unit­ed States inter­vened in numer­ous for­eign elec­tions, more than twice as often as the Sovi­et Union.” The author is a pro­fes­sor at Har­vard Law School. The whole thing is fas­ci­nat­ing.
  4. Free Speech, Cen­sor­ship, Hate Speech, Twit­ter (Steven Brust, per­son­al blog): “Here’s the thing: every defense, every anal­o­gy I’ve seen to jus­ti­fy ask­ing twit­ter to shut down hate speech, has come down, in the last analy­sis, to a defense of prop­er­ty rights. And yet, the most casu­al obser­va­tion ought to tell you that we are now locked in a bat­tle between prop­er­ty rights and human rights. If you must resort to a defense of prop­er­ty rights to bol­ster your argu­ment, I beg to sub­mit that you should either take anoth­er look at what you’re defend­ing, or stop call­ing your­self a pro­gres­sive.” A social­ist defense of free speech.
    • Relat­ed: I Was the Mob Until the Mob Came for Me (Bar­rett Wil­son, Quil­lette): “In my pre­vi­ous life, I was a self-right­eous social jus­tice cru­sad­er. I would use my mid-sized Twit­ter and Face­book plat­forms to sig­nal my wok­e­ness on top­ics such as LGBT rights, rape cul­ture, and racial injus­tice…. Then one day, sud­den­ly, I was accused of some of the very trans­gres­sions I’d called out in oth­ers. I was guilty, of course: There’s no such thing as due process in this world.”
    • Also relat­ed: Plan­et of Cops (Fred­die de Boer, per­son­al blog): “The woke world is a world of snitch­es, infor­mants, rats. Go to any space con­cerned with social jus­tice and what will you find? End­less sur­veil­lance. Every­body is to be judged. Every­one is under sus­pi­cion. Every­thing you say is to be scoured, picked over, ana­lyzed for any pos­si­ble offense. Everyone’s a detec­tive in the Divi­sion of Prob­lem­at­ics, and they walk the beat 24/7…. I don’t know how peo­ple can simul­ta­ne­ous­ly talk about prison abo­li­tion and restor­ing the idea of for­give­ness to lit­er­al crim­i­nal jus­tice and at the same time turn the entire social world into a kan­ga­roo court sys­tem.” This is an old­er piece but I saw it for the first time recent­ly.
  5. For Some Gang Mem­bers In El Sal­vador, The Evan­gel­i­cal Church Offers A Way Out (Emi­ly Green, NPR): “Becom­ing a devot­ed mem­ber of an evan­gel­i­cal church at a young age is the only way many ado­les­cent boys are able to avoid being roped into a gang, Cruz says. And it’s also the only way for them to get out of a gang if they’re in it, short of leav­ing the coun­try.”
  6. Sanc­tu­ary amid hous­ing cri­sis (Wendy Lee, San Fran­cis­co Chron­i­cle): “With no end in sight to soar­ing hous­ing costs, sev­er­al Bay Area faith orga­ni­za­tions have become a sanc­tu­ary of sorts — not just chan­nel­ing dona­tions and dis­trib­ut­ing food, but also offer­ing a safe place for peo­ple liv­ing in cars or RVs. The arrange­ment has some­times grat­ed on neigh­bors, but for pas­tors, it’s sim­ply an exten­sion of their mis­sion to serve human­i­ty.”
  7. Bald­ing Out (Christo­pher Bald­ing, per­son­al blog): “In Chi­na, there are very few peo­ple who I wit­ness live a tes­ta­ment of their belief. Who knows if the Par­ty mem­ber is a mem­ber because he believes in Marx­ism, Com­mu­nism, Xi-ism, or sim­ply wants a bet­ter apart­ment? Who knows if the per­son who claims to be a believ­er in democ­ra­cy but com­plies with the Par­ty actu­al­ly believes that or just tells the for­eign­er? For­eign­ers in Chi­na in posi­tions of influ­ence who claim to believe in human rights but col­lab­o­rate with the Par­ty to deny Chi­nese cit­i­zens rights need to answer for their actions. I have lit­tle idea what peo­ple in Chi­na believe but I know that if the Par­ty ever falls, there will be more than a bil­lion more peo­ple claim­ing they were clos­et democ­ra­cy advo­cates.” An Amer­i­can pro­fes­sor reflects on Chi­na as he pre­pares to leave. Very inter­est­ing, a bit ram­bly.

Less Serious Things Which Also Interested/Amused Glen

Things Glen Found Interesting A While Ago

Every week I’ll high­light an old­er link still worth your con­sid­er­a­tion. This week we have This Is What Makes Repub­li­cans and Democ­rats So Dif­fer­ent (Vox, Ezra Klein): the title made me skep­ti­cal, but there are some good insights in this arti­cle (first shared in vol­ume 32 back in 2016).

Why Do You Send This Email?

In the time of King David, the tribe of Issachar pro­duced shrewd war­riors “who under­stood the times and knew what Israel should do” (1 Chron 12:32). In a sim­i­lar way, we need to become wise peo­ple whose faith inter­acts with the world. I pray this email gives you greater insight, so that you may con­tin­ue the tra­di­tion of Issachar.

Disclaimer

Chi Alpha is not a par­ti­san orga­ni­za­tion. To para­phrase anoth­er min­is­ter: we are not about the donkey’s agen­da and we are not about the elephant’s agen­da — we are about the Lamb’s agen­da. Hav­ing said that, I read wide­ly (in part because I believe we should aspire to pass the ide­o­log­i­cal Tur­ing test and in part because I do not believe I can fair­ly say “I agree” or “I dis­agree” until I can say “I under­stand”) and may at times share arti­cles that have a strong par­ti­san bias sim­ply because I find the arti­cle stim­u­lat­ing. The upshot: you should not assume I agree with every­thing an author says in an arti­cle I men­tion, much less things the author has said in oth­er arti­cles (although if I strong­ly dis­agree with some­thing in the arti­cle I’ll usu­al­ly men­tion it).

Also, remem­ber that I’m not report­ing news — I’m giv­ing you a selec­tion of things I found inter­est­ing. There’s a lot hap­pen­ing in the world that’s not mak­ing an appear­ance here because I haven’t found stim­u­lat­ing arti­cles writ­ten about it.

If this was for­ward­ed to you and you want to receive future emails, sign up here. You can also view the archives.